Les Gagnants
2022 ALTER-CINÉ GRANT WINNERS
In 2022, the Alter-Ciné Foundation received 144 documentary submissions from countries of the Global South.
Asmahan Bkerat, recipient of a 10,000$ Alter-Ciné Foundation grant
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A first $10,000 award is granted to the Jordanian-Palestinian filmmaker Asmahan Bkerat for her project Concrete Land.
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION
An intimate portrait of three generations of a Bedouin family, and its struggle to hold on to its traditional life under the pressures of urbanization. Their only wish is to stay together, with their loyal yet eccentric pet sheep, Badrya, firmly by their side. Now, the life of the
still-singing family is about to change as the construction of new buildings and the steady encroachment of the city challenges their way of life.
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Khoroldorj Choijoo, recipient of a 10,000$ Alter-Ciné Foundation grant
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| A second $10,000 grant was awarded to the Mongol filmmaker Khoroldorj Choijoovanchig for his project Colours of White Rock. |
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Sweeping over the Gobi Desert wastelands wrought by Mongolia’s mining boom, Colours of White Rock captures the story of Maikhuu, one of the rare women truck drivers fighting for survival along the country’s hazardous coal roads. As we discover her ensnared in this highway, her journey holds up an astounding, poetically incisive mirror to the human and environmental costs of “Minegolia”.
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Ricardo Martensen, recipient of a 10,000$ Alter-Ciné Foundation grant
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A third $10,000 grant was awarded to the Brazilian filmmaker Ricardo Martensen for his project Regarding Memory and Neglect.
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION
What is left of us after death? Bones? Belongings? Images? Memories? For how long do these traces of existence remain on Earth? These are the questions that guide this film through five stories from different times in Brazil. In all of them, something in common: the imposition of oblivion. A cemetery located in a poor region of São Paulo has been a place of concealment of corpses since its foundation in the early 1970s. A forensic laboratory seeks to understand what the bones of people buried 50 years ago have to tell us. Mothers fight for memory, truth and justice since their sons were murdered by the Military Police in São Paulo in 2006. A small institution seeks to tell the story of the largest slave port in the world hidden under layers of concrete in Rio de Janeiro.
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Priscilla Aguirre, recipient of a 5,000$ Alter-Ciné Foundation grant
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A $5,000 grant was awarded to the Ecuadorian filmmaker Priscilla Aguirre for her project Nosotras.
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION
This is the portrait of a group of incarcerated women who attend a film workshop inside an Ecuadorian prison. As they film themselves and the cells that are their worlds, they reflect on their pasts and their dreams. Their stories will be connected by a common experience: living different forms of motherhood marked by absence.
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Sourav Sarangi, recipient of a 5,000$ Alter-Ciné Foundation grant
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Sourav Sarangi, an Indian filmmaker, was awarded a $5,000 grant for his project Fair-Home Fairy-Tales.
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Rachael Macbean (78, Christian) lives in Kolkata with Abdul (65, Muslim), her foster son. Her mind wanders to Maymyo, an idyllic hill town in Burma (Myanmar) where her mother Fenella lived in the 1940s. To escape the Japanese invasion during WWII, Fenella's family trekked 600 miles through bombed cities and the perilous Hukawng valley. Only miracles helped them reach India. 70 years later, in a rented workshop crammed with puppets and pets, Rachael uses theater and puppetry to tell her unknown family story, one shared by millions, across many borders, even today.
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Victoria Alvares, recipient of a 5,000$ Alter-Ciné Foundation grant
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A $5,000 grant is awarded to the Brazilian filmmaker Victoria Alvares for her project Même si tout s'écroule.
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION
In a suburb of Recife, Brazil, Cris’s life is a in a difficult process of transformation. She and her husband lost their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic, along with the house they lived in with their three children. Desperate after discovering that she is once again pregnant, Cris campaigns for women’s access to tubal ligations, struggles to earn a living and recreate herself as an online influencer, even as she works to rebuild her house and her family’s life.
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Berke Bas, recipient of a 5,000$ Alter-Ciné Foundation grant
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A $5,000 grant was awarded to the Turkish filmmaker Berke Bas for her project Hold Still.
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION
In October 1995, at the height of the decades long Turkish-Kurdish conflict, the military detained fifteen people in the Kurdish town of Dargecit in Southeastern Turkey. Seven of the detained, among them three children, were never seen alive again. What followed was a relentless, decades long fight by the families, first in search of their beloved ones, and later in search of justice for them. Families reached out to local lawyer Erdal Kuzu for help. Kuzu was at their side, when dark rumours led them to water wells in the vast Mardin landscape, and to the bodies of loved ones.
Twenty years after the killings, just before the statute of the limitations, a court case was opened against 18 defendants, including state officials and their paramilitary squads, on charges of “premeditated murder”. But this was only the beginning of a judicial path paved with growing indifference, denial and discrimination… heading towards impunity.
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